Resources

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An Order of Cybersecurity with a Side of "Hope"

This is a true story. I was sitting at breakfast the other day with my wife. As we waited for our food to arrive, four people were sitting at a socially distanced table. They were discussing how they have to restart their computers every month because of “something Microsoft does that makes me restart.” The conversation continued: Diner 1: “That’s...
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Lessons From Teaching Cybersecurity: Week 1

As I had mentioned previously, this year, I’m going back to school. Not to take classes but to teach a course at my alma mater, Fanshawe College. I did this about a decade ago and thought it was interesting, so I was excited to give it another go. Additionally, after a friend mentioned that their kid wanted to learn Python, I developed an Intro to...
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NERC Publishes Practice Guide for Assessing SVCHOST.EXE

One of our customers (You know who you are, thanks!) made us aware of a new practice guide titled “ERO Enterprise CMEP Practice Guide: Assessment of SVCHOST.EXE” published exactly two weeks ago today on September 15th, 2020. North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) seldom releases guidance like this, so they shouldn’t go unnoticed....
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Preventing Shadow IT from Blindsiding your Zero Trust Plan

I’ve spoken before about Zero Trust approaches to security, but for many of those starting on their journey, there isn’t an obvious place to start with the model. With this post, I wanted to share an example approach I’ve seen working that many organisations already have in place and can be easily rolled into a larger program of Zero Trust hardening...
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Understanding Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk Management (C-SCRM)

Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk Management (C-SCRM) deals with more than protecting an organization from cyber-attacks on third parties. It also addresses third parties to those third parties (known as “fourth parties”). Further still, a vendor to your vendor's vendor is a fifth party, then a sixth party, etc. Your SCRM should involve knowledge of...
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Mount Locker Ransomware Demanding Ransom Payments in the Millions

A new ransomware strain called "Mount Locker" is demanding that victims pay multi-million dollar ransom payments to recover their data. According to Bleeping Computer, the ransomware first began making the rounds in July 2020. The malicious actors responsible for this threat took a cue from other crypto-malware gangs by stealing victims' unencrypted...
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Helping Inspire the Next Generation of Cybersecurity Professionals

If you had asked 10 year old Tyler what he wanted to be when he grew up, the answer would have been a very enthusiastic, “Teacher!” Over time, however, that desire lessened as my fascination with technology grew. I ultimately ended up attending Fanshawe College to study Computer Systems Technology. I never fully abandoned that desire to teach,...
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Joint “CYPRES” Report on Incident Response Released by FERC

Earlier this month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) published a joint report entitled “Cyber Planning Response and Recovery Study” (CYPRES) in partnership with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and eight of its Regional Entities (REs) in order to review the methods for responding to a cybersecurity event. The...
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Being Cyber Resilient Is Critical for the Maritime Industry

Cyber-attacks against maritime and shipping organizations are only increasing. Notwithstanding the IMO’s requirement for organizations in this sector to achieve cyber resilience by 2021, more and more entities are being crippled by malicious attacks. Maritime cyber-attacks are increasing The last victim in a long list of cyber-attacks was cruise...
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Scammers Impersonating Texas Gov't Departments to Send Fake RFQs

Scammers are impersonating governmental departments within the State of Texas to send out fake Requests For Quotations (RFQs). On September 21, Abnormal Security revealed that it had spotted an attack email that impersonated the Texas Department of State Health Services. Scammers used spoofing techniques to camouflage the sender address as an...
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How CISOs Can Foster Effective Comms and Build a Cybersecurity Program

For many organizations, security flows from the top down. That’s a problem when executives don’t emphasize security as much as they should. Cisco learned as much in its CISO Benchmark Study “Securing What's Now and What's Next 20 Cybersecurity Considerations for 2020.” Here are just some of the findings from Cisco’s study: A majority (89%) of...
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Stop Wasting Your Time and Money with a “Checkbox" SCM Solution

By now, we know a lot about secure configuration management (SCM). We know the way it works, the integral processes of which it consists, the areas of your IT infrastructure that it can help secure as well as the different types of best practice frameworks and regulatory compliance standards with which it can help you to maintain compliance. All we...
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Maze Gang Distributed Ransomware Payload Inside VM

The gang responsible for the Maze ransomware family conducted an attack in which they distributed their malware payload inside of a virtual machine (VM). Sophos’ Managed Threat Response (MTR) observed the technique in action while investigating an attack that occurred back in July 2020. In that incident, the attackers packaged the ransomware payload...